It has long been known that small, living plants can be packaged and shipped in commerce, but unforturnately, in most such instances, either the packaging arrangement has been so expensive as to make such enterprises not feasible, or else the packages have been so insubstantial that the shocks and jolts encountered during shipping are so disruptive of the plant and its root system as to prevent the plant reaching its destination in a live and healithy condition.
Various efforts have been made to design lightweight, inexpensive shipping containers, including the use of bags made of thin walled plastic. However, in each known instance, these and other such arrangements have not been sufficiently sturdy as to assure safe arrival of plants, and the plants frequently needed attention during transit if loss was to be prevented.
Additionally, the shipping containers of the past have been quite unsatisfactory insofar as display of a plant to a potential customer was concerned, which of course meant that the packaging mode of a plant had to be entirely changed from the condition in which it was being displayed, in order to place it in a proper form for shipment. It was for reasons of the substantial limitations of these prior art arrangements that I was caused to make a careful study of packaging arrangements that would enable a more or less conventional box arrangement to serve as a display device, as well as a low cost, highly effective shipping container.